White Linen 
Estée Lauder (1978)

A classic aldehydic, white floral that wears fabulously in the heat. The dry down is also strangely addictive.

A beautiful, crisp white floral of impeccable cleanliness, all while not crossing the "fresh" cliché. Easily the most impressive use of aldehydes outside of No. 5.

Classic, beautifully made and impossibly tidy. Easily worn by both sexes, ideally in small quantities so as to avoid smelling "functional".

Sophia Grojsman's perfumes are characterised by two things : their rose-violet theme, and their massive structure - based on large blocks of methyl ionone, Iso E Super, Galaxolide and Hedione.
It's a blend that bears her name, the Grojsman accord. (There's a video on YouTube explaining how it works.)

White Linen was Sophia Grojsman's first perfume and can be seen as her manifesto.
It's a version of the late 19th century rose-violet bouquet but done in a new synthetic style that's quite unlike anything that existed before.
In effect she took an old genre and made it new again.
The fact that White Linen is an aldehydic rose-jasmin - which resembles No5 - makes her first perfume even more audacious. Grojsman was in effect squaring up to Ernest Beaux, just as she took on the male establishment at IFF, and showed them she was their equal; shas the imagination and skill to prove it.

White Linen is a fruity-soft bouquet of violets and rose, headed up by an unctuous citrus-mandarin accord - as well as aldehydes - and at the bottom there's a creamy and slightly woody foundation which smells a bit like clean laundry.
And, because I tend to smell rose bouquets as pink, to my mind this smells of Pink Linen, not white.

Grojsman started as she meant to go on - with this superlative rose-violet. Since then, she has mostly explored variations of it. She is the Cézanne of perfumery - not the Picasso that some have said. Cézanne was the visionary who obsessed about the same subject over and over, and without whom there would be no Cubism. Without Sophia Grojsman, there would have been no monumental Eighties perfumery.

Grojsman is more than a great technician, she's a visionary artist.
She's on record saying that - to her, perfume is music for people's souls.
If that's so, this must be her choir of cherubim. Lovely.

I like the floral notes, although the animalics can get to be just a bit too much for me. It lasts a long time, especially if it gets on clothes. I actually like the far, far dry down better than any other part--smelling it on a shirt two days later is lovely.

I happily used my sample, but will probably not repurchase, as this reminds me a bit of my mother-in-law, and I want to smell different.